


we never knew the answer (but we knew one thing)

by theatrythms



Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: Abortion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Abortion, womanhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-04-07 16:17:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19088605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theatrythms/pseuds/theatrythms
Summary: Here is all Wendla knows;Melchior Gabor has starlight in his eyes.And she was too young to be a mother.





	we never knew the answer (but we knew one thing)

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this a while ago after Ireland legalised abortion, and idk . got interested thinking abt the modern au concept of this . not saying there's a right/wrong choice to make , but I liked something abt wendla reclaiming girlhood despite everything . in this au made things less forced/dubious but I hope you enjoy !  
> title comes from hunger by florence and the machine !

Here is all Wendla knows;

 

Melchior Gabor has starlight in his eyes.

 

And she was too young to be a mother.

 

When she’s older, a more mature version of herself at the mere age of sixteen, she can understand that. She pushes her hands against her flat stomach, and now never imagines that swell that never even began. Not anymore at least. She looks around her room, a museum full of artifacts of girlhood and adulthood merging in front of her eyes. She no longer sees a cradle.

 

Her life is no longer an ode to what her life could have been. A shrine to a child she maybe might have had.

 

(When she does think of the alternate universes, where maybe her and intense and passionate Melchior actually do raise a child. Anna’s vow of a household of love and joy is imprinted in her mind, every time a boy with curls like either her’s or Melchi’s comes into her head.)

 

(She doesn’t picture a daughter. There’s something heartbreaking about that. A girl to love even more than her own mother loved her.)

 

-

 

Melchior comes back from his very strict reform school, stays for a day expecting her and a baby, and leaves the next day.

 

He returns properly in the winter. Smooths his hair out to shake the snowflakes. It’s shorter now, like he’s cropped it and it’s only beginning to grow again. He smiles at Wendla when their eyes meet.

 

Reform school has made a man out of him.

 

(The abortion took any semblance of girlhood left from her.)

 

He rejoins their class like nothing and everything has changed. He’s calmer now, jokes he found God amongst cold shower rooms and morning drills. He lets his facial grow until it’s awkward and patchy and the butt of all of Mortiz and Otto’s jokes, an act of defiance in a school that forced you to stay clean shaven.

 

He isn’t a half God emerging from the sea, like the way she used to think he was. He’s no Christ leaving the tomb three days later. He’s a boy-man caught in an aged limbo, just like the rest of them.

 

And he never does not smile at her.

 

“Good morning Wendla.” He says once every morning, shaking snow out of his hair, late January dragging to February. “Here’s to another fresh day.”

 

Her stomach flips at that. Instead she nods before the teacher begins. “Here’s to another fresh day.”

 

(They haven’t spoken about it. They talk about books and school and movies and plays and everything else. Wendla wants to bring it up but she can’t picture the idea of that smile falling.)

 

So instead she smiles back at him. Calls him Melchior and Melchi like everything is fine. As if she didn’t feel his weight on her, or as if she hasn’t seen the look of awe on his face when her knickers were bunched around her knees.

 

Things are fine. School continues. Melchior Gabor has starlight in his eyes.

 

-

 

Alcohol sweeps through her year like a virus. Better that than mono, Martha says, and all the girls agree. It starts with Thea, when her parents get more lax about her drinking at meals with them, a glass of wine with their supervision. Somehow it continues to Anna and Hanchel sitting under the oak, distributing cheap beer and wine coolers in the beginning of summer.

 

So the evenings stretch and taste like ripe fruit.

 

Someone brings a guitar, or more awkwardly, a bassoon or French horn and enjoy the ambiance. They all just sit and sip and no one gets drunk but everyone sort of acts like they are.

 

”Jeez Wendla, what would your mother think?” Thea grins, threading her arm through hers and giggling in her ear. Ilse is at the foot of the oak with her ukulele strumming mindlessly and Martha is over off near the fire, with a boy her age too shy to hold her hand.

 

“I can’t even imagine what she’d say!” Wendla says, giggling high and bright.

 

(In the back of her mind there’s one mother’s ashen face as the nurses lead her in.)

 

(What would her mother say? Would she lie again?)

 

Melchior now never brings his books or journal out with him when everyone gets together. Instead he sits and and laughs and talks, about things teenagers talk about. She dares to say he’s connecting with others.

 

Half of Wendla thinks it’s the reform school.

 

He waves at her from across the clearing when she arrives. Less of that cocky smirk and more like he wants to see her there.

 

Nothing looks so refreshing as changed behavior, Wendla also thinks.

 

“Some of the guys used to make hooch in the dormitories.” Melchior tells her, laughing like it’s a fond memory, but he doesn’t touch his drink. People are dancing in the shadows of the fire, the moon an afterthought against the flames. “Not really my taste though.”

 

(She makes a note to look up what hooch is. She hates to feel stupid around anyone anymore.)

 

“That sounds crazy.” She laughs instead, as she puts her drink down. “I’m going to go dance.” Wendla says firmly, heart rate calm yet fast and she feels like he can hear it.

 

Melchi smiles, but she feels his eyes on her anyway.

 

-

 

She never tells her friends. She hopes they just piece it together one by one.

 

They never talk about pregnancy.

 

There’s no need really.

 

The 46th anniversary of Roe vs Wade comes and goes and Wendla doesn’t know what to think. It passes, in a split second of clarity. She’s sixteen, almost two years since she went into the hayloft someone else and came out like she is now.

 

(She remembers Mama asking, with a shrill, panicked tone, if she wanted a baby, if she wanted a baby at fourteen, if she wanted to be a mother. Wendla remembers shaking her head, and the appointment was the following week.)

 

Martha cups Wendla’s still-wet cheeks. “Wendla? What’s wrong honey?”

 

(Yes, something did happen. For the best, naturally. But it still happened. At one point, Wendla Bergman was pregnant, and no one lets her remember it. And no one lets her talk about it.)

 

Wendla shakes her off, smiles, and blames some old whispering wind that blew into her eye. She accepts a hug and a promise of something cold and sweet.

 

The summer is ending, after all.

 

-

 

In Autumn, they finally talk about it.

 

The leaves lie dead.

 

“Mama brought me.”

 

He nods, scuffs the ground with his shoe.

 

“Figured that’s what happened.”

 

“At first, I didn’t really know what to think, or uhm, do, really. I didn’t even know-”

 

She squares her shoulders, and carries the weight of what they done gently.

 

“That we needed to use protection, to… avoid getting pregnant.”

 

(Reform school made a man out of him. They were just children themselves.)

 

“I should’ve thought things through, I should’ve been more careful.” Melchior says, full of remorse.

 

Melchi looks her in the eyes when he apologizes. It’s a small gesture, but she feels human. Not cursed or sinful or tainted.

 

(Even still, it had hurt and she didn't know how to feel afterward, but in the moment, with Melchior back then, she liked it and said yes, and yes, and yes. The guilt came after.)

 

“I should’ve told you about the abortion.”

 

(That sentence has always been too big to say.)

 

“It’s okay.” He says, squirming at the word. In all his lofty concrete opinions, he could never settle on one. Some ideologies are afterthoughts, he’d once boasted, in a time that feels forever ago. “I’m sorry you had to go through it alone. My mama said it was probably for the best.” Melchior finishes with a half-hearted smile. She can’t tell if he’s actually sad or won’t tell the truth.

 

It doesn’t stop Wendla thinking about the last year. She thinks of open air cinemas with her friends. Dancing with her stereo on full blast when mama had left for errands. Reading for school assignments. Reading for fun. Doing crosswords in her brother-in-law’s papers and playing with her nieces.

 

She was still so young to be a mother.

 

“It was.” Wendla says. And Wendla smiles.

 

And Melchior smiles back.

 

-

 

Here is how Wendla grieved.

 

Quietly. Swiftly. Silently. How do you recover from a wound when no one wants to mention it in the first place?

 

Ines, her dear sister with children of her own comes to visit, when Wendla’s still sore and passing clots.

 

It does not help the healing.

 

Ines helps her clean herself when her thighs run with rivets of crimson. When she faints in the den. When her head gets weak and it feels like there’s not enough air in the room.

 

Ines sits in the ambulance with her. Their mother’s shame forces her to follow in the car like a lost shadow, desperate to be reattached.

 

(But in the back of that ambulance, all Wendla needed was her mother. Someone to hold her and tell her maybe everything will be fine.)

 

(She maybe even needs Melchior, the boy who won’t answer her emails.)

 

Ines greets doctors and nurses, with kind hands and smiles that help as much as they can.

 

They must know what happened, Wendla thinks, after one of the women doctors brings her some orange juice and iron vitamins.

 

“It’s just your anemia,” she states brightly. “The bleeding was just a bit heavier than normal, but it’s nothing majorly serious aside from your iron deficiency.”

 

The room is empty, Ines returning home to collect a change of clothes, the only sounds in the world are the dim hum of the lights and the sounds of hushed voices in the early morning. When she cranes her neck, Wendla can see the sunrise creep up between the trees.

 

The doctor however, stops at the door handle, turns on her heel with another bright smile, maybe a bit more tentative. There’s something she wants to say, to her fourteen year old patient who recently had an abortion, Wendla can guess, and braces herself for whatever barating that’s yet to come. The words her mother once said but then never spoke again, the disappointment clear in Ines’ eyes when she rubs lukewarm water over her thighs.

 

“Wendla,” she begins. “Have you considered going on the pill?”

 

(She doesn’t tell her mother, but since then her acne has cleared up, when her periods return they’re less painful, and her stomach and thighs fill out a bit more. No one is none the wiser.)

 

-

 

Wendla kisses Melchior first. After months of building their relationship to a better strength than it was before; calling him Melchi without the word turning to ash in his mouth; without hurting to hear his voice.

 

Months of his smile, bright and warm.

 

Wendla leans up on her tiptoes and kisses him in the first bloom of spring, weeks away from her sixteenth birthday but feeling older still. It’s chaste and soft and sweet, and probably the first kiss she deserved all those months ago in the hayloft. But it warms her all the way through.

 

When she pulls away, Melchior’s eyes are sweet and wise. His hand flies to his lips, fingers probing at now-swollen skin. He hasn’t felt anything this pure before.

 

“Wendla,” he starts, lips peeling back to reveal a bright and nervous smile.

 

“I’ll see you tomorrow Melchior.” She replies, pushes a flyaway curl away and walks back home.

 

-

 

Sixteen flies by swiftly. Melchi and her “go steady” and are hardly alone. Her mother doesn’t let him past their stairs and his parents only invite her in for dinner, in tense awkward silence. His father calls her the ‘bitch he knocked up’ when he thinks she can’t hear him.

 

Two years since the hayloft passes and she makes up an excuse why they can’t hang out that day. She has a doctor’s appointment to renew her prescription.

 

But this is innocent and courting love. The power dynamic shifted a long long time ago. In Moritz’s basement Melchior jumps onto the coffee table after too many beers and serenades her in front of all their friends.

 

Maybe, in a world where things are different, Wendla Bergmann has a two year old child, and maybe she’s happy in that world. But this is where she is, and where she knows she’s happy. Wendla Bergmann is someone’s friend, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s girlfriend.

But she’s no one’s mother, and maybe that’s for the best.

  



End file.
